Introducing the Descriptive Parametric Model: Gaseous Profiles for Galaxies, Groups, and Clusters

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Descriptive Parametric Model (DPM) for generating gaseous halo profiles, enabling multi-wavelength mock observations of galaxy, group, and cluster halos with various calibration options.

Contribution

It presents the DPM framework with three calibrated model families for gaseous halos, facilitating realistic simulations and analysis across different wavebands.

Findings

Models with shallower profiles at lower halo masses fit observations better.

The DPM successfully reproduces X-ray, SZ, and UV observational data.

The framework highlights biases in halo gas modeling across wavebands.

Abstract

We develop and present the Descriptive Parametric Model (DPM), a tool for generating profiles of gaseous halos (pressure, electron density, and metallicity) as functions of radius, halo mass, and redshift. The model assumes single-phase, spherically symmetric, volume-filling warm/hot gas. The DPM framework enables mock observations of the circumgalactic medium (CGM), group halos, and clusters across a number of wavebands including X-ray, sub-millimeter/millimeter, radio, and ultraviolet (UV). We introduce three model families calibrated to reproduce cluster profiles while having different extrapolations to the CGM -- (i) self-similar halos, (ii) a reduced gas model for lower halo masses, and (iii) a model with shallower radial slopes at lower masses. We demonstrate how our z=0.0-0.6 models perform when applied to stacked and individual X-ray emission profiles, measurements of the thermal and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect, electron dispersion measures from fast radio bursts, O VI absorption, and UV-derived pressures. Our investigation supports models that remove baryons from halos more effectively and have shallower profiles at lower halo mass. We discuss biases and systematics when modelling observables using consistent hot gaseous halo models for all wavebands explored. We release the DPMhalo code to encourage the use of our framework and new formulations in future investigations. Included with the DPMhalo distribution is a set of recent observations that allow the reproduction of most plots in this paper.